You need a booking system especially now, this is why!

Your salon makes money by selling time and expertise to your clients.  Your clients buy from you because you deliver high quality treatments and provide an outstanding experience to them at a price that they feel is good value. To optimise your salon and its revenue potential this breaks down to two key focus areas:

1.    Removing low value time consuming activity from you and your staff’s day so you maximise productive billing hours.

2.    Ensuring that your client has a high quality experience that they are willing to pay for and will come back again and again.

In our recent blog we discussed how an e-shop and its capabilities could reduce low value and inefficient interactions (Whats App, texts, social media messages and phone calls) and save you the time you spent processing orders, collecting payment, and dispatching product, while at the same time offering a premium buying experience for your clients to buy your products and drive revenue for your Salon. We were in lockdown then so we all had time to spare and low value activity was not such a problem. Now we don’t, now it’s costing you money.

Another big time waster, is manually managing new appointment requests. Once again, this involves low value interactions withWhatsApp / Social media DMs /  texts that require a response because they are incomplete with information or long unnecessary telephone calls trying to match the current high demand to the Salon’s limited capacity. Other service experts like barristers or architects charge by the hour for their skills, how many conversations do you think they have with their clients about the weekend that they can’t charge for?  You made no money for most of last year and now you have infinite demand and an opportunity to finally earn back. You don’t want to waste it on activity that you can’t charge for!

In short, If you're serious about optimising your Salon, as well as getting an online shop, you need a booking system.  The shop will deal with your customers in the virtual world, an online booking system is what you need for the real world!

A good booking system, well-configured, will provide a return of at least 20% gained through  increased productivity, increased client spend with product and service “up sales”,reduced administration and more frequent client visits. To put it another way a20% increase in productivity means that in a 5 person salon, 1 person who was doing stuff you could not charge for, now can! Assuming €50 per hour as an average for treatment(s) this means that there is an additional potential revenue of €375 or more per day or c€7,500 or more per month. A booking system makes your services available to your clients 24 hours a day, every day with no effort required from you.

Seems like a no brainer but despite this most small to medium Salons do not use an online booking system. One reasons for this is because some of the more known industry, pre-baked solutions, can be un-affordable for small Salons. Their pricing model is to lock you into expensive monthly subscriptions which become a fixed cost to the Salon regardless of how much business the Salon is doing. Something that became very apparent in the recent lock downs. In addition, there has been little investment in these platforms so the quality of their offering has fallen behind even some of the most basic technologies in the market place.

The alternative is to do it yourself and go it alone with one of the many solutions out in the market place.  But which one? Do you have the time and skills to configure it? Isn’t it easier to stick to the 2021 big black desk diary and shouting across the Salon to confirm availability? “Lisa, are you working next Wednesday?”.

MyApp.ie specialises in the Beauty Industry and provide a family of solution to solve these problems. We can provide easy solutions designed to empower you. We can ‘do it for you’ Manage all of the salon booking system build and set-up and transfer control of the booking platform to you.  Over the coming weeks we will take a look at some of the industry salon software options currently in the market place for online booking systems and will outline what you can expect from them.  

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